Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and…
Pope Leo XIV, who has made peace and unity priorities of his pontificate, emphasized that “the more we are reconciled, the more we Christians can bear credible witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is a proclamation of hope for all” and, in the words of Pope Francis, “a message of peace and universal…
My classes are generally small enough that I have time to get to know each student’s writing. When a student who confuses “bias” and “biased” in a hand-written response later that day sends me an email later that day that uses “whom” and “betwixt,” I notice. I can’t prove a student is abusing AI, but…
Anyone seen “Hamnet”? I was not too impressed by “Shakespeare in Love,” which perpetuated the biographical fallacy — that the key to unlocking the one, true meaning of a literary work is listing how each detail in a literary work “could represent” some detail in the author’s life, and that once you’ve constructed that list,…
The following comment appeared recently on one of my YouTube lectures, “Historical Context for American Literature.” American???? So where are: CANADA, MEXICO, GUATEMALA, CUBA, COSTA RICA, BRAZIL, CHILE ARGENTINA, PERÚ, COLOMBIA, PANAMÁ, URUGUAY, PARAGUAY, EL SALVADOR, HONDURAS, VENEZUELA… ETC ETC ETC. STOP SAYING THE UNITED STATES IS AMERICA! Here’s how I responded: Geography and names…
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and…
From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.) Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers…
Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
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A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
“Aw, man, you know the brother um takin’ ‘bout. He always be up at Eddie’s, light skin, heavy-set, like a fly-on-the-wall, be greasin’ secondhand tweeds, that ol’ newsboy cap, slanted to one side, pencil stub behind his ear. “Wylie to Elmore…. wit’ them empty side pockets, his corduroys be singin’ the blues, cues Bessie on the…
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It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item. Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a…
I first taught Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle during an intensive 3-week online course during the 2020-21 winter break, during the Time of Covid. The nature of that course was such that I could only reasonably require students to read 6 of Wilson’s 10 plays; I think I required everyone to read 4, and then split the…
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…
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